Initial setup enquiry

eiwaveeiwave
in KiwiSDR Discussion
Hii,

After collecting lot of information I have decided to work on SDR, and I like KiwiSDR most, but before I purchase I have basic doubt about using SDR with PC.

1) can I use SDR board alone for transmitting ADC data to my PC directly either by Ethernet or USB, means I don't want to complicate things with adding beagleBone.
I just want ADC data in my PC for detection, I also don't want web Server and waterfall diagram.


please give some suggestion

mailID - shubham.dwivedi@eiwave.com

Comments

  • jksjks
    edited May 2018
    Hi,

    The Kiwi is not really suitable for transferring ADC samples directly to a PC compared to most other SDRs. This is by design. Most other SDRs transmit as large a bandwidth as possible of baseband IQ samples directly to a PC over the simplest interface possible (usually USB).

    The Kiwi is designed to be a standalone device connected directly to a local network and optionally to the Internet. It provides multiple, independent narrow-bandwidth channels for direct use by a browser. To do that the Kiwi requires the BeagleBone. The Ethernet interface is on the Beagle, not the Kiwi board. The Kiwi only uses an SPI interface between its FPGA and the Beagle.

    Fortunately we are at a point in time where there are lots of SDR designs available, with different features and different price points. You should have no trouble finding exactly the device you need. Something like the HackRF, SDRPlay, AirSpy, LimeSDR, PlutoSDR etc. See https://www.rtl-sdr.com for reviews.
    WA2ZKD
  • eiwaveeiwave
    Hii,
    Thanks for quick reply, but I have Artix 7 FPGA in kiwi so if I make a microblaze design and give ADC samples on it and then by using Ethernet protocol transfer data to PC, will this work?
    because I am already using GNURadio which is opensource and having all library supported so I just want to transfer data to it and rest of the work will do by it.
    please reply I am beginner to SDR design.

    mail ID - shubham.dwivedi@eiwave.com
  • jksjks
    edited June 2018
    The Kiwi board is not a general-purpose FPGA development system. So there are no guarantees you can get it to do what you want. There are a few (10 I think) FPGA pins that are routed to the P8 header. But they may not be on the correct Artix 7 pins to support Ethernet RMII (i.e. differential, length matched and on the necessary clock-generating pins). GMII operation at 125 MHz for gigabit Ethernet is almost certainly impossible on the current board.

    I think you would do better with another board that already has these problems solved. I know the 14-bit ADC plus Artix 7 at the Kiwi price point is attractive. But it is really a very optimized device that was designed for a specific purpose.
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